Livingston grasping for ways to restore middle school sports

LIVINGSTON -- A budget season marked by cutbacks wiped out sports at Heritage Middle School in Livingston for the coming year.

Next week, the school board will look at three options to bring back at least some aspects of the athletic programs, which were among the most extensive in the region. All three, though, would oblige parents to pay as-yet-undetermined fees so that their sons and daughters can compete.

The board’s three options include: outsourcing athletics to the YMCA – so far the only entity to return a request for proposal to manage the sports programs; keeping the programs in-house, but reducing their frequency to three afternoons from five, which would nevertheless entail a substantial fee; or enhancing intramurals.

“The landscape of public schools is reshaping itself right before our very eyes,” Superintendent Brad Draeger said. Severe cuts in revenue, coupled to rising expenses is obliging districts, students and parents to make choices that have to this point not been contemplated, he said.

The $98 million budget approved by voters this spring cut those programs as administrators contended with more than $6 million in lost revenue, most of it due to state aid cuts.

Cutting the middle school sports programs saved the district $380,000. The district also eliminated 85 jobs, including about 10 teachers. An annual sixth-grade camp, nonessential transportation and some planned capital improvements were also trimmed.

As the administrators and officials grappled with the severe cuts – Livingston lost 100 percent of its state aid – the district’s priority was to keep academics intact, the board president, Bonnie Granatir, said.

About half of the school’s 800 kids participated in at least one of the 18 sports the school competed in last year. Dozens played more than one sport, meaning that 532 students participated in interscholastic athletics last year, at an average cost of about $430 for each student in each sport.

Granatir said the looming cuts led a coalition of parents and administrators to begin devising solutions as early as March. An advisory fees committee then went to work, coming up with several solutions, including the three up for the board’s consideration.

Draeger, the board and administrators will host a public meeting Thursday to consider the board’s options and answer questions.

In the meantime, the administration is talking to the teachers union to see if cuts in the stipends paid to coaches – salaries make up about 72 percent of the middle school sports budget, Granatir said – can be negotiated.

But Draeger and Granatir cautioned that the district could face even more state aid cuts next year. Any further whittling of aid could imperil other programs, including high school sports, or oblige parents and administrators to carve out yet more fee-based activities.